


EVERY PIECE OF ME WANTS EVERY PIECE OF YOU

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: Day6 (Band), TWICE (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Princess Diaries Fusion, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25566082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: After two years of laying low out of the public eye and seven hundred seventy-five days after a slip up in her now-infamous Dispatch interview, Nayeon officially gets cleared to attend her high school reunion under this singular ultimatum – Brian Kang Younghyun Young K of the JYP Entertainment soloist fame absolutelycannotbe in attendance.Or: modern-day Korean royalty Nayeon and Hallyu star Brian had one of the worst break-ups of the 21st century. The problem is, 1) neither of them everreallygot over it and 2) now everyone and their mom knows about their beef.
Relationships: Im Nayeon/Kang Younghyun | Young K
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51
Collections: Director's Cut Fest





	EVERY PIECE OF ME WANTS EVERY PIECE OF YOU

**Author's Note:**

> me: what is love? princess diaries au nayeon!!   
>  also me: isn't brian be the taylor swift kind of writing-about-his-exes songwriter...
> 
> biggest thank you to the mods for all their patience T___T ♡♡♡ also shout-out to ellie and shida for lending me their [eye emoji] ♡♡♡ this wouldn't have been possible without your emotional support hand-holding!!

After two years of laying low out of the public eye [EFFECTIVELY HOUSE ARREST, ASIDE FROM THE YEARLY _CHUSEOK_ AND _SEOLLAL_ MANDATED PUBLIC EVENTS AND THE OCCASIONAL CHARITY BALL WHERE – IN ORDER TO SCARE HER OUT OF ANY OTHER POTENTIAL PRESS DEBACLES – EVERYONE ELSE ON THE GUEST LIST COULD NOT BE LESS THAN TWICE HER AGE] and seven hundred seventy-five days after a slip up in her now-infamous Dispatch interview [ **THE** PRESS DEBACLE OF NOTE, VIEWED 50 MILLION TIMES ON YOUTUBE ALONE – NOT INCLUDING THE OCCASIONAL NAVER VIDEO THAT MADE IT PAST THE ROYAL PR TEAM RADAR FOR A FEW DAYS BEFORE GETTING TAKEN DOWN, NOR THE TECHNICALLY UNLICENSED KAKAOTALK ANIMATED STICKER SET MADE FROM WHAT NETIZENS REGARDED AS THE BEST SOUND BITES], Nayeon officially gets cleared to attend her high school reunion under this singular ultimatum – Brian Kang Younghyun Young K of the JYP Entertainment soloist fame absolutely _cannot_ be in attendance.

Forty-four minutes into said reunion, there’s just a bit of a situation.

“What do you mean ‘he’s here?’” Jihyo says over the phone, so loudly that Nayeon can hear it echo against the bathroom walls. “Did you not RSVP?” Nayeon chews her bottom lip, guiltily silent. Jihyo’s voice reaches a fever pitch high. “A princess always RSVPs!”

“I told Jeongyeon I was coming!” Nayeon whisper-yells back. This much is true sans the other facts of 1) that was, like, only yesterday and 2) Jeongyeon was still in the States for her grad school program, which could account for the possible delay of through-the-grapevine friend circle news transmittal. These, Nayeon graciously omits the mention of. “I don’t know – he’s been avoiding me for years! I thought he was just gonna keep writing thinly-veiled break up songs about me until he has to go to the military!”

“Nayeon,” Jihyo starts with a sigh, “Do you really think another two years is going to change anything? I mean, Taylor Swift is still writing about Kanye. And please tell me you’ve been going to your syntax sensitivity classes.”

That’s also unfortunately a negative. “Look, can you just send the car over?” Nayeon pinches the bridge of her nose, remembering the smile slipping off Brian’s still-very-much-her-type-of-handsome face when their eyes met across Sungjin’s family’s restaurant five minutes ago and the mortifying silence that had ensued. And she’s been hiding out in the bathroom ever since. “Obviously I can’t stay here _now.”_

“Okay, okay.” And then Jihyo pauses. “How long do you think you can hog the bathroom for?”

**[enter-talk] Princess Im Nayeon’s reaction to having a chart-topping hit written about her: “What did love ever do for me?”**

[+305, -67] She and Kang Younghyun really have bad blood between them, don’t they? ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

[+127, -11] Heol, this guy’s career is built on writing songs about his exes... He must be a serial dater for real… I mean if I could write #1 songs about every person I dated, I’d do it too though…

[+68, -5] If you watch the full interview it’s super interesting how people connected the dots that she was talking about Kang Younghyun... I can’t believe they went to high school together! She talks a lot about how she was lucky to experience that kind of relationship before she started her responsibilities as a princess, but that looking back on it now, she’d probably stop her past self from getting involved with someone because it obviously hurt both of them in the end. She’s more mature than I thought.

[+232, -45] Has the princess always been this funny? But why is this so awfully relatable ㅠㅠ

Nayeon can only say this with confidence now [THAT SHE'S SPENT THE BETTER OF THE LAST TWENTY-FOUR MONTHS LIKE A PRINCESS FROM THE FAIRY TALES HER MOM USED TO READ HER AS A KID – LOCKED UP IN A TOWER, EXCEPT THIS WAS REALLY MORE OF HER OWN DOING. THE LARGELY SELF-IMPOSED SOCIAL EXILE SOMEHOW MADE HER MIND AUTOPLAY THE GREATEST HITS OF EVERY EMBARRASSING MOMENT SHE'D EXPERIENCED IN HER TWENTY-SIX YEARS OF EXISTENCE], but life at sixteen was a lot simpler than she'd made it out to be at the time. Thinking about it seriously, her biggest problems back then revolved around how many days in a row she'd worn the same hoodie over her school uniform, getting to the snack bar in time on the days they sold croquettes, and whether or not everyone had heard the sonic boom of her falling for Jeongyeon's cousin Brian Kang Younghyun, who'd just come back from a semester of studying abroad in Canada, the day she'd walked into her first class rep meeting for the school year.

"Hey, Nayeon," he'd smiled when she held out her hands for the weekly agenda.

"Hey," she'd managed to squeak back. His grin grew wider before he turned back to face the front and Nayeon mentally kicked herself while pushing up her round frames. She'd later taped that stupid piece of paper into her diary so that the corners stuck out, yellowing and a constant reminder of her awful school-girl crush.

That was before she’d learned her absent-since-childhood father was a distant descendant of the royal House of Yi, and that with his passing, the title of princess would go to her. And even before that, Brian and a group of his friends in the year above hers formed a band for their school festival and performed four songs, and Nayeon knew then with the bad auditorium lighting making him shine too bright on the stage that he’d find someone perfect for him and break her heart someday without even realizing it he’d even had it in the first place.

“You’re kidding,” Jeongyeon deadpanned when he’d caught up with them afterwards, walking back home with his guitar case slung over his shoulder. She flicked the shiny business card a supposed talent scout had given to Brian with an index finger. “How can you be sure that this isn’t a scam?”

“It looks real!” he insisted. It’d been the beginning of winter then, and Nayeon remembers her glasses fogging up from how she’d tucked her face into her scarf. He looked to her from Jeongyeon’s other side, eyes pleading for backup, to which Nayeon shook her head. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“They could harvest your organs or something,” warned Jeongyeon, passing the card along to Nayeon. The blue logo on the back looked convincing enough to her. “I’d rather have my first year in high school _not_ end in a family tragedy, okay.”

Nayeon shrugged and reached over to hand the card back to him. “Don’t forget us when you become famous,” she said, tucking her hands back into her coat pockets in haste when their fingertips barely brushed.

Brian grinned down at her, bright like the sun against the melting snow piled on the sides of the street. “I’ll save you a front-row seat to my first concert,” he promised. Nayeon used to convince herself that he was the type to be too nice to his younger cousin’s best friend like that and tried to never read too much into it. “You better cheer extra hard for me.”

Nayeon pressed her lips together to hide her giddy smile. “Really?” she asked as Jeongyeon scoffed in between them.

“Really.” And the simplest thing was, back then, she’d always believed him.

And now Nayeon's sitting on the toilet lid in the bathroom of a restaurant, playing an outdated version of Candy Crush on her phone that's at a pitiful twenty-one percent. Nayeon's never been big on karma, but – looking at her behavior for the last few years post-scandalous interview, for the most part objectively – even she thinks she doesn't deserve this [AFTER PAINSTAKINGLY AVOIDING EACH OTHER'S CIRCUITS SINCE BREAKING UP – MOSTLY OUT OF COURTESY BUT ALSO OUT OF AN UNIMAGINABLE AWKWARDNESS THAT WOULD PROBABLY RESULT IF THEY WERE EVER FORCED TO CROSS PATHS – NAYEON EVEN GAVE UP HER INVITATION TO THE KOREA DRAMA AWARDS LAST YEAR WHEN SHE SAW BRIAN'S NAME ON THE PERFORMERS LIST, AND SHE'D REALLY BEEN HOPING TO FINALLY MEET KIM SOOHYUN]. Someone out there in the universe _really_ had to have it out for her to let Brian waltz back into her life like this, apropos of nothing.

“An _hour?”_ she’d echoed Jihyo’s ETA when she first told her. “Can’t you, like, turn all the traffic lights green for me?”

“We’re the royal family, Nayeon,” Jihyo sighed. “Not firefighters.” See further: universe – 1, Nayeon – 0. Distracted by her own anger, Nayeon connects the wrong candy pieces on her screen and promptly runs out of moves without passing the level.

She almost misses the faint knocking on the door over the reverb of her very un-princess-like groan in the bathroom acoustics. “Nayeon?” and _god,_ as if things couldn’t get any worse, of course it had to be freakin’ Brian Kang Younghyun Young K. She feels her cheeks flush hot with embarrassment.

The knocking continues. “Nayeon, are you in there?”

Nayeon curls into herself and buries her head in her arms. Unfortunately, like all the _nothing’s wrong!_ texts she’d sent in the months leading up to their falling out, Brian just can’t take the hint. “Look,” he says on the other side of the door. “I’m heading out now, so you can come out of the bathroom if you want. I –” he stops himself, pausing for a moment before continuing, “I didn’t know you’d be here tonight.”

Another beat of silence. Nayeon glances up at the door, wondering if he's already left. “I’m sorry,” he finally says, more loaded and sincere than context would’ve necessitated it to be.

Here’s the thing: when Brian asked her out all those years ago, it’d been a Sunday morning the winter break before Nayeon was supposed to graduate high school and begin her duties as princess. He’d run all the way from the trainee dorms on an unauthorized outing to stand outside her second-floor window with Jeongyeon’s old boombox, the faint drum beats of a catchy band song playing from the busted speakers.

“Princess, let your hair down!” he’d bellowed, the most annoying prince-charming smile lighting up his face when she finally opened her window. He started singing along to the music as Nayeon fumbled for her glasses and prayed that the cranky first-floor ahjumma wouldn’t file a noise complaint on her.

“Kang Brian Younghyun,” Nayeon hissed with her torso halfway out the window, the wind blowing her unruly hair into her face. She tucked it behind her ears to no avail. “What the heck are you doing!”

He pointed with his free arm towards the boombox hoisted up on his shoulder. “Wrote a song for you!” he replied, still too loud for the morning with the music blasting next to his ear. He’d shielded his eyes from the sun and the light caught in his bleached hair and for all she’d swore to herself that she’d get over this one-sided crush of hers one day, in that moment, Nayeon couldn’t help but be a hook, line, and sinker goner for him. “Just like I promised!”

 _“What?”_ Right after he’d successfully passed the audition, the three of them had celebrated over a late-night order of chicken in between _hagwon_ and Nayeon’s princess lessons [“DO ROYALS EAT THEIR CHICKEN DIFFERENTLY?” JEONGYEON TEASED WHEN NAYEON EYED THE CHOPSTICKS FOR THE RADISHES ON THE TABLE. “SHUT UP AND GIVE ME A GLOVE,” SHE’D SCOWLED IN RESPONSE, WIPING THE LIPSTICK OFF HER MOUTH WITH THE BACK OF HER HAND].

“You should write songs about us,” Jeongyeon suggested after washing down a drumstick with a long sip of Cola. “Like, _dedicated to my awesome cousin who’s been there for me since day one.”_ She made a rock-on sign with her glove-covered hand.

Brian snorted into his plastic cup. “You mean more like, _I almost didn’t get into this company because Yoo Jeongyeon thought I was getting scammed.”_ He tilts his drink towards her in a mock-cheers. _“Thanks.”_

When Jeongyeon had headed to the bathroom, Nayeon decided against the better of her dignity and broke the comfortable silence between them. “What about me?” she suddenly blurted. “Will you write a song about me?”

The clock in Jeongyeon’s family’s living room ticked once, twice, three times. Nayeon knew her cheeks had to be red, even under the perfect layer of foundation she’d learned to apply on her face. Their eyes met, and Brian's gaze softened. “Of course I will,” he told her at last, so seriously that Nayeon couldn’t have believed him.

And less than a full year later, he’d actually gone and done it. “You can’t just _do_ this, Kang Younghyun!” she yelled back down at him. “Are you nuts?!”

“You have to listen to the lyrics!” Brian shouted back, hand cupped around his mouth. And then – if Nayeon wasn’t already mortified enough – he’d started singing along, loudly. _”I like you, I tried holding it back but I can’t anymore. Now I can tell you –”_ He paused when he saw her stricken expression. “Do I need to turn the volume up?”

Nayeon hid her face in her hands, her heart beating so hard and fast that she thought it might dislocate from her chest and into Brian’s hands two stories down with that stupid boombox. “If I let you come up so I can listen to it _properly,”_ she huffed, “Will you stop causing a public nuisance?”

And when she finally peeked at him from between her fingers, that beautiful grin of his was taking root across his mouth. “Maybe,” he replied lightly, just as she thought it’d split his face.

But they’d broken up when Brian was blonde and halfway across the world on a concert tour, and a rumor was going around that he was dating one of his labelmates after they’d released an OST for a popular drama together. And Nayeon knew it couldn’t be true but she called him late at night in his timezone anyway, thinking about the school-girl crush she’d had on this boy who, even in the best fairy tales, could only ever break her heart in the end because she’d never be the perfect one for him, and said “I think we should end things.”

He’d been quiet on the other line for a beat. And then he asked, so gently that she realized she’d broken him, too, “Am I not enough for you?”

Reflexively, she began without knowing what exactly she’d say, “I –”

And the call went dead. And then he wrote a hit song about how she'd unceremoniously dumped him that she’d watch him perform on her flat screen TV when she was particularly in the mood for self-loathing, and now they’re here after all these years, unable to face each other without the bathroom door as a buffer.

Just when Nayeon thinks she’ll hear him walk away with all these what-ifs, the door jostles with the weight of someone leaning against it. “You know,” starts Brian. "It was really good to see you again."

Nayeon looks up from the lap of her expensive brand-name jeans and her clenched fists slack. He laughs that same laugh the sixteen-year-old version of herself wanted to frame onto her wall, in between her movie posters and bad magazine clip-outs of her favorite idols. “I just – Isn’t it so stupid?” That’s where Brian should’ve belonged, packed into an old shoebox amidst all the other things she’d supposedly outgrown, sun-faded from years of being pasted opposite her open bedroom window. “It’s been years and I thought if we ever ran into each other I’d be okay, but I’m,” there’s a thunking sound on the door, like he’s hit his forehead against it, “here talking to an empty restroom, admitting that I’m still in love with the girl I’ve liked since high school.”

“Not all of these songs are about me, right?” she’d teased him once when she’d gotten home after a long day of charity galas and found a first press edition of his latest album propped on her desk next to a vase of fresh flowers. There’d been a bad drawing of a rabbit on the namecard that she’d kept in her wallet for months until she accidentally threw it out with a stack of old receipts. She flopped onto her princess bed with her free arm hugging the record to her chest. “I mean, you had to have, like, _the_ biggest crush on Baek Ayeon back in middle school.”

“But you’re the only one for me,” he’d told her without missing a beat. It made Nayeon feel all the more sentimental, knowing that this couldn’t be the truth.

 _“Stop,”_ she groaned, placing the album on her bedside table before turning onto her stomach. Brian’s laugh came in distorted and staticky from all the way in the States, where he was playing shows, over the phone. She kicked her feet in the air, contemplative, and bit her lip. “You shouldn’t just say it so easily like that.”

“Why not?” he asked when it’d petered out.

“Because,” Nayeon sighed. She propped her chin on her pillow. “Then I’ll never want to let go of you,” she admitted.

A car honked on Brian’s side of the line, an entire ocean away from her. Even so, his voice was warm with the phone receiver pressed close against her ear when he’d said, quiet for only her to know: “Then don’t.”

“Crap,” the Brian of now says, muffled on the other side of the bathroom door. “My manager’s gonna kill me if I don’t –” His voice starts to fade as he turns away from where Nayeon’s hunching in on herself on the toilet lid, and all she knows is this is exactly how it’ll go down in history, in the chapter of her life when she let herself lose a boy who wrote songs about losing her.

Except, of course since this is the universe out to thwart every single attempt she’s made to save face we're talking about –

Nayeon’s fight-or-flight response that only seems to work in a bad emulation of every early 2000s rom-com climactic love declaration kicks in on instinct. And as she jumps to her feet, her phone that’d been balanced precariously in her lap skids across the restroom floor until it hits the door with a resounding thud, exposing her position.

Brian’s footsteps pause. “Nayeon?”

And well – here’s one for the royal swear jar – _shit._

**Lyrics from “Cinderella” by Young K**

You said I could dance with you but didn’t let me into the hall / And now I could say I hate you, but that wouldn’t solve anything / I’m still standing outside by the stairs where you dropped your shoe / Where you told me you loved me, but this princess is a liar, huh?

All things [SEE: AT BEST, FLAWED OVER-CAUTIOUSNESS IN THE WAKE OF HAVING CAMERAS POINTED AT HER NEARLY 24/7; AT WORST, COMPLETE CRASH-AND-BURN SELF-SABOTAGE] considered, Nayeon _does_ have something that she likes to call her happy ending hypothesis. And that hypothesis goes a little like this –

One time, maybe a year into their relationship, Brian spent the last day of his week-long break from his popstar activities sneaking into her suite, and Nayeon bribed her bodyguard – who'd caught them when Brian was halfway in through her bathroom window – to let him stay no later than an hour past her princess curfew, tops. They'd curled up together on the couch, half-watching bad TV over the take-out that had gotten squished in Brian's unsuccessful attempt at parkour, half-talking louder than the audio so they couldn't tell what was actually happening in the melodrama, and then the main characters were suddenly crying and yelling at each other as the world around them seemed to stop.

"Don't be like that," Nayeon mentioned as she laced her hand into his. The female lead was red in the face while the main character stared back at her in silence, tears streaming prettily down his youthful-for-twenty-seven face. She pressed her fingertips against his callouses and the side of her mouth into his shoulder. "If you break my heart, Brian Kang Kang Younghyun" she threatened while stifling a yawn, "I'll make the whole nation go after you."

She felt his laugh pressed against her cheek, shaking next to her own mouth. "I'm pretty sure that's an unfair use of your power," he pointed out. "You'd let the public burn me at the stake?"

And Nayeon had always imagined the way he'd let her down would be like this: with the diplomacy of precisely the type of prince who'd grown up being too nice to his younger cousin’s best friend, who'd grown up trying not to read too much into it. "Maybe you'd deserve it," she joked, badly.

Brian turned his face toward hers then. She leaned forward to brush their lips together, painfully aware of the capacity they both had to destroy this eggshell-delicate thing between them.

Funny, how the tables turn like that.

Nayeon screws her eyes shut. "It's fine!" she says loudly, sounding slightly hysterical to her own ears. "I just dropped my phone!"

Her feet are asleep when she stands up to go grab it. She tries her best to waddle over, gritting her teeth at the pins and needles sensation shooting up her legs with each step. "Everything's –" and consequently loses her balance stooping down to pick it up, hitting her knee against the door in the process, _"– ow,_ FINE!"

Brian lets her have a moment of silence to mop up her spilled dignity from the bathroom floor. "Nayeon, are you okay?" he asks then. Unfortunately, it sounds like he actually cares.

"Don't be nice to me," Nayeon whimpers. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other while leaning against the door, trying to regain enough feeling in them for her _actual_ fight-or-flight, if it has to come to that. "The nation and all your overseas fans know that you hate me."

She hears Brian laugh through his nose. The door rattles as he presses his weight against it. "Are we really going to do this right here?"

 _Well_ then. Nayeon fumes at that, hitting her hamstrings with a fist, possibly with too much force. _"I_ _'m_ not the one who decided to treat a single-person bathroom like a confessional!" When she presses the home button on her phone, the screen traitorously stays dark. She shoves it into the back pocket of her jeans with a huff. "Like, _I_ wasn't the one who aired my dirty laundry to the world without thinking about the NDA!"

"Nayeon, _you_ were the one who broke up with _me,"_ Brian reminds her, as if she hasn't relived that exact moment on loop for the past two years like an action replay of ruining her own potential happiness. "You shut me out first. And we didn't even have an NDA, you know."

She opens her mouth to rebut. Closes it. God, he just _has to be_ right. Nayeon gently head butts the door, wondering how everything had gone perfectly wrong between them. "Guess you don't need an NDA to hurt my feelings," she grumbles in her complete misery.

"I," starts Brian. She hears him take a deep breath before exhaling. "I think I've ruined your night enough." There's the faint sound of his hand hitting his thigh, and Nayeon's mind fills in the image of him dropping his arms at a loss. "I'm gonna go. But you should stay. You should have fun with everyone."

Nayeon reaches for the door handle suddenly, feeling her heart fly to her throat. The eighteen-year-old part of her that was brave enough to ask him to write a song about her wants to run out the door, wants to reach for his hand, face him, and tell him the truth. But those were the kinds of things you could only do when you were too young to worry about losing your pride, or re-opening old wounds that you'd habitually pick until they bled. "I thought you'd fight for me," she confesses in a rush, worried that she'll never have this chance again. "I thought if you really cared about me, you wouldn't have let me –" she stops for a moment, waiting for her tongue to catch up with the right words, _"– us_ go so... so easily."

Silence. In the distance, she can hear their old friends chatting indistinctly over the latest single from a popular boy group made up of high school-aged kids. "It's not that simple, you know," he finally says just when Nayeon's begun to wonder if he's left and that this chance has slipped out of her hands.

She frowns. "What do you mean?"

"I mean – you'll always be the princess." He laughs dryly. "But once I go to the military, who knows what my future'll look like?" His voice softens. He's always been like that with her, she realizes then, too nice to his younger cousin's best friend, too vulnerable facing the girl he was in love with. And she'd gone and smashed that into smithereens, splayed all over the media headlines. "I'll be this has-been idol singer, bringing you down. And then what?"

And Nayeon's never been so sure before in her life of what she's wanted, and so unafraid to reach for it, even if that means she'd fail. "You could be a has-been idol singer who's dating the princess," she suggests.

Nayeon can hear the smile in his voice. "You can't possibly want that," he tells her.

She turns to her side so her shoulder's leaning against the door. "You know," Nayeon says, sucking in a breath. She hugs herself and braces for the impact. "I have this happy ending hypothesis."

Brian's voice sounds so much closer to her like this. "Oh yeah?"

"I used to imagine the most perfect storybook ending for myself that I thought could happen in real life,” she continues, swallowing the lump in her throat. “And in it, I’d have things like… actually feeling like I’m doing a good job as princess. Making a difference.” She laughs at herself. “Not creating PR disasters every time I give an interview.”

Brian hums on the other side of the door. “And yeah, I hope there’ll be someone standing next to me through all that. But I never let myself think –” and the words feel thick and stuck to the roof of her mouth, “‘Yeah, that person beside me is going to be Brian Kang Younghyun Young K.’ I...” she trails off, not knowing what else to say.

“Nayeon,” Brian only begins after a measure of her silence. “I’d want to be that person for you.”

“But do you want me to be that person?” And in that moment, Nayeon feels her heart break and mend itself whole again, all at once.

Brian found her hiding out in the stairwell near the music room the day after the shop owner who’d given her a makeover blabbed to the press about having royalty among her clientele. Nayeon’d been nibbling on her salad, navy hoodie hiding her now-straight permed hair.

She scowled when she saw that it was him. “How’d you know I was here?” she frowned, scooting to make room for him beside her on the stairs out of habit anyway.

He’d grinned at her, bright. His knee briefly knocked against hers when he sat down and Nayeon felt her heart flutter. “Princess radar.”

Annoyed, Nayeon turned away from him and back to her salad. “Don’t you _dare_ say the P-word!”

Brian laughed. “Fine!” he conceded, a little too easily. Nayeon eyed him warily. He scrunched his nose at her. “Pringles.”

 _God,_ he was insufferable. “Go eat lunch somewhere else,” she grumbled, covering her salad with her body. She rubbed her eyes, dry from wearing contacts for the first time.

Brian dangled a plastic bag before her. “The snack bar had croquettes today,” he negotiated. Nayeon lunged for the bag immediately. “And Jeongyeon said you might need eye drops.”

She took a deep breath of the fried smell in the bag. “My knight in shining armor!” she proclaimed, peeling back the paper wrapper and taking a huge bite. “Honestly," she said with her mouth very un-princess-esque full, "Where would I be without you, Kang Younghyun?”

He drew his knees toward his chest and rested his head against his arms, watching her. “I still think it’s funny that they’re making you take princess lessons,” he commented. “It’s gonna take a lot to get you to eat like a royal.”

Nayeon felt her face flush as she self-consciously reached to wipe the crumbs from her face. “Don’t tease me,” she warned. His smile only grew wider. “I’ll ask my grandma and Jihyo to make your life hard if you do!”

“Sure, sure,” Brian replied, sounding thoroughly unconvinced. He leaned in a little, taking a closer look at her face. “Hey, you have an eyelash here –” and he reached over to brush his fingers, feather-light, near the outer corner of her right eye. “Got it.” He held out his index finger to her, where it was balanced. “You should blow on it and make a wish.”

Nayeon made a face. “You actually believe in that?”

“Or you could chance ten years of bad luck,” shrugged Brian. “Your choice.”

Nayeon put down the croquette. _“Fine,”_ she said.

She closed her eyes. It was childish and stupid, but she wished there in that unused stairwell with the faint sound of the school bell ringing in the distance, sitting next to the boy she’d harbored a silly crush on, that they’d always stay like this.

And then she let out a breath. When she opened her eyes, the eyelash was gone and Brian was staring at her in a way she’d never noticed him looking at her before. And for once, Nayeon gathered up her courage and meet his gaze.

When Nayeon cracks open the door, it’s like she’s sixteen all over again, staring at this beautiful boy singing his heart out on the stage for her and not even realizing it.

Brian Kang Younghyun Young K looks at her more or less the same way he’d looked at her then, and when he’d stood outside her window that winter break holding a boombox playing the first song he’d written for her, and the first time he’d leaned in to kiss her, calloused fingers gentle against her chin as fireworks crackled in the night sky. He’d never stopped looking at her like that. He’d never stopped looking at her like that.

“Are you gonna let me in this time?” he asks, that favorite smile of hers beginning to dawn on his face.

Nayeon presses her lips together, feeling her own grow with that tell-tale giddy school-girl crush sensation, rising from her rib cage. “Maybe,” she tells him.

And this time, she lets it.


End file.
